Can a Rake task on Heroku time out?

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+1 Q:

Can a Rake task on Heroku time out?

I'm using Heroku and would like to have a script (on another server) called via cron that periodically requests an action on my Heroku app. This action will in turn run some processing that may take 1 or 2 minutes to complete. I believe Heroku has 30 second request limit, I was thinking could call a Rake task from my controller action instead.

Would this work? I'm curious if anyone has tried this yet.

Thanks.

+1 A:

I'd recommend using a background job on a worker for this. Your periodic process would then just have to start the worker and it wouldn't matter how long the process took.

jonnii 2010-02-22 13:18:04

Thanks. But I should have added that I'd like to avoid a background worker. I only need to do this periodically and adding a workers would be a bit costly for this. I was hoping a rake task would do the trick.

Jim Jones 2010-02-22 13:21:40

You can dynamically control the number of workers you have, you can fire one up just for the duration required to execute your task.

jonnii 2010-02-22 16:22:28

Can i execute a worker via an HTTP request that calls a rake task?

Jim Jones 2010-02-24 18:20:25

You'd most likely make a web request to a restful service which would register a new delayed_job. This would get picked up by the worker immediately.

jonnii 2010-02-24 18:23:26

thanks this is very helpful. so, i could have a controller action that uses the heroku client lib to create a worker upon request. but, how could i tear the worker down after the job completed?

Jim Jones 2010-02-24 18:35:02

At the end of your task start a new delayed_job task to bring the worker down. I haven't tried this, so I'm not sure if it'd work, but it'd be worth a try. Have you also looked at using a cron task?

jonnii 2010-02-24 19:45:51

+1 A:

The rake task would work as long as you don't use a HTTP request as proxy to initiate the task. In fact, if the task is forked from a HTTP Request, the timeout will be the same of the HTTP request.

You should a different method to start the task. Either a crontab (on Heroku side) or a Worker as good solutions.

Simone Carletti 2010-02-22 13:50:04

ansaurus

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Can a Rake task on Heroku time out?

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